The future success of the wireless web will be dominated by the dissemination of personal content. Personal content refers to herein content created in real-time by individuals and that is of personal nature. A primitive form of personal content creation and dissemination exists today based on cellular phones equipped with cameras and carriers supporting multi-media messaging, or MMS. This type of content dissemination is primitive because it only allows point-to-point media distribution—i.e., the user takes a picture and sends it directly to another user. However, the wired web has created an ecosystem for content creation and dissemination that is very sophisticated, but highly targeted towards corporations and businesses. The wireless web will evolve to enable a similar ecosystem for personal content creation. However, this vision requires a supporting infrastructure capable of addressing the associated challenges, including group management, media distribution, and dynamic graphical user interface mapping for heterogeneous devices.
The Internet has become the fastest adopted mass media mechanism in history ahead of even radio and TV. One of the keys to this success is the sharing model that allows any user to publish information that can be accessed worldwide. Furthermore, the grouping of data into pages and the use of hyperlinks to define data connection graphs provide an elegant yet simple mechanism to associate distributed sets of data. The Internet sharing model can be divided into four processes: media generation, media organization, media visibility, and media access. The first three processes are related to the media publisher, while the last one is related to the end user, or the media viewer. Media generation involves gathering data that the publisher wants to export. This data includes captured media such as audio, video and pictures, and generated media including documents, annotations and records from databases. Media organization is related to the logical structuring of the media and how it will be presented to the users. Media visibility defines policies to control the data accessible to different users. Finally, media access is the process by which users (media viewers) access the published data.
The four processes denoted in the paragraph above are generic and can be mapped to different domains. With Wired Web, the traditional World Wide Web model is characterized by servers connected to the Internet via wired connections and hosting commercial and personal websites. Wireless web denotes a sharing model refers to Personalized Group Wide Web that assumes collections of personal handheld devices wirelessly connected and hosting personal information that can be shared directly from the device with groups of users. Both models differ in terms of media generation, organization, visibility, and access. In this paper, we emphasize the differences, explain the challenges associated to the Wireless Web model, and present a software infrastructure that accommodates these challenges.
Yahoo Groups allows people to exchange messages, pictures, and calendar and database entries. See Yahoo Groups, http://groups.yahoo.com. However, this model is not customized for handheld users that would be required to upload all the media from their handsets to the central server. Instead, the PGWW model is based on the assumption that media is exported directly from the handsets and can be automatically migrated based on a number of properties.
Blogging is a combination of a diary and guide site that allows people to publish media and links in real-time to a website. See Blogger.com, http://www.blogger.com. However, blogging has no concept of group, once a person logs into the website, the media he or she generates will be visible to everyone. Furthermore, blogging assumes a connection to a central server that hosts the blog. Handset users do not have tools that allow them to leverage their devices by pre-processing some of the data. Furthermore, there is no mechanism to notify users about new media posted in the blog. As a result, users must periodically check for new additions.
Instant messaging allows users to exchange messages in real-time and it is widely used worldwide. For more information, see AOL Instant Messenger, http://www.aim.com/index.adp and Microsoft Messenger, http://messenger.msn.com/. With the advent of smart phones instant messaging programs have been ported to these devices, therefore allowing users to exchange messages at anytime. Although the middleware infrastructure for personalized group wide web (i.e., sharing of personal content with groups of people) can be extended to support instant messaging, the original approach is intended to allow users to post media that can be accessed by interested parties.
There are two standard mechanisms to share resources among mobile terminals. One of them assumes a client-server approach where all the functionality and the resources are at the server side. Clients push and obtain resources to and from the server. The second approach assumes that there is no server infrastructure. As a result, the sharing infrastructure is partitioned among the handsets following a peer-to-peer approach.